It’s set in Minneapolis, and the affection for the city which pervades this novel is one of its best qualities. It’s not a “Borderlands” novel - no rock’n’roll elves here, just rock’n’roll faeries - but it has a similar flavor.
I missed Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks when it was first published in 1987. (Once the novelty wore off, I thought the “rock’n’roll elf” sub-sub-genre itself started to get stale.)
In particular, Emma Bull was one of several writers involved in the “Borderlands” project, a “shared universe” setting which yielded several novels and loosely-linked anthologies. The homogeneity may have been helped by the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons, which codified a unified fantasy backdrop setting, including elements explicitly drawn from Tolkien and other fantasists (and which ultimately inspired books of its own).Īt some point, genre writers, who I have to presume, were frustrated by heroic fantasy’s increasing adherence to convention (and arguably, therefore, reduced creativity) started writing fiction which melded otherwordly entities with contemporary urban settings. Many specific attributes of Tolkien’s fiction, like a vaguely feudal/English pastoral culture and the presence of multiple humanoid races, dominated the new sub-genre. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy burbled merrily along as a cult favorite for years, gradually picked up steam, and eventually became an unprecedented publishing phenomenon, and - as writers and publishers alike realized there was more money to be raked from the Tolkien-reading hordes - the template for a new sub-genre (“heroic fantasy,” a.k.a.
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